I was born twice. First in a wooden room that jutted out over the black water of the Thames, and then again eight years later in the Highway, when the tiger took me in his mouth and everything truly began.

So begins Jamrach’s Menagerie, Carol Birch’s shortlisted novel for this year’s Booker Prize. Jaffy Brown, aged nine, is rescued from the jaws of a tiger on a street in nineteenth century London. Incredibly though it may seem, this beginning is based on a true event: in 1857 a child was saved, in similar circumstances, from an escaped tiger by its importer, Charles Jamrach—hence the name of the equivalent character in the book, and its title.

Yet Jamrach’s Menagerie is not about the menagerie. Nor is it about Jamrach. The story is Jaffy’s: it is an adventure, a coming-of-age tale and—in the end—a story about friendship, at its strongest and its most heartbreaking. Jaffy speaks with an old man’s voice, reliving his journey, telling his tale, and sharing his wonder.

The novel is, for the most part, wondrous. Its characters appear like those in a fantasy. There is Jaffy, the fatherless urchin who is a friend to the animals; the magician and circus master, Jamrach; Tim Linver, the golden boy, who is selfish and cruel and yet braver than anyone imagines; and his sister, the fiery and fickle woman-child, Ishbel. Jaffy is even off to catch a dragon—Tim, too, on the Lysander, a whaling ship bound for the South Pacific.

Birch’s narrative is anchored with scraps of history: the tiger, the end of whaling, and the 1820 sinking of the Essex, which casts its shadow across the latter third of the book. I found this to be a rewarding feature of the novel.

Most striking, though, is the author’s language. Birch invokes all of the reader’s senses, whether Jaffy is in the sewers and streets of dockside London, inside the heaving belly of a ship or on its decks, or among the hot, lush islands of the Dutch East Indies. There Jaffy says, “I felt we had reached those storied places, the siren realms where mermaids sing and lotus-eaters gorge, where Sinbad the Sailor paces the deck and dreams of crystal streams and rubied caverns…” The reader, also, feels as though they are in a dream. Jaffy’s world seems brighter, and incredibly beautiful (though it can be crude and bloody as well).

But with the capture of the dragon—a mere lizard, a sly captive, then a demon—Jaffy’s tale turns into a nightmare. When the Lysander sinks its crew are set adrift, and their sanity, their reality, begins to disintegrate.

Jaffy survives the ordeal, of course, but not unscathed. His suffering overwhelms the narrative’s final part; Jaffy staggers towards an ending, raw, lost, and unable to forget. When Jaffy does get a happy ending (of sorts) the reader can’t quite believe it. This is Jamrach’s flaw. I was left dissatisfied—as Jaffy is, I think, longing to return to before, to the sea and to the dream.

By Amy Stevenson

Jamrach’s Menagerie is available through Text Publishing.